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using participle to shorten relative clauses

Good afternoon everybody,
I was wondering if an expert from this forum could be so kind as to clarify to me the following:

as far as I have understood, you can use participles to shorten relative clauses if you have a relative clause in which the relative pronoun is the subject.
This should mean that a sentence like this:

The police followed two youths who were driving a stolen car.

can be reformulated with the aid of a participle construction as follows:

The police followed two youths driving a stolen car.

But my question is whether such a sentence could be misunderstood. I mean, could it be that we do not know exactly who is driving a stolen car, whether the police or the two youths?
I am not an Englisch native speaker, of course.